Tag Archives: real estate soldotna ak

Soldotna Real Estate residents don’t have to have children at home to know when we’ve gone through the familiar back-to-school rituals. Just turn on a radio or TV, step into a retail store, or drive past a school and the calls to educational muster are evident. At the same time, it’s hard not to be reminded how significant education is when it comes to Soldotna Real Estate home buying—how likely it is for schools to be on the forefront of many buyers’ minds. Most people know intuitively that top-notch schools carry significant weight in the searching and home buying processes—but the result of a survey done by realtor.com has spelled it out in black-and-white. Their … Continue reading →

For any Soldotna Real Estate resident who has ever been stymied by seemingly arbitrary (or, put another way, nutty) lowering of his or her all-important credit score, next month’s beginning rollout of Fair Isaac’s new credit score model should be welcome news. It will be known as “FICO 9”—and promises to correct a few of the previous model’s inadequacies. Why now? It’s been six years since San Jose’s Fair Isaac Co. last tinkered with their credit score methodology. Hmmmm…it’s been six years, too since the financial crisis of 2007-08, which Wikipedia correctly describes as “a major global recession characterized by various systemic imbalances…including high levels of household debt…” You might expect that the accuracy of … Continue reading →

With spring in the air, you don’t have to have your Kenai Real Estate home for sale to catch the spring cleaning bug. Whether or not you’ve been cooped up inside for a longer-than-usual siege of the wintertime blues, as soon as the weather turns the corner, there seems to be a natural urge to open the windows and start freshening your place up. Spring also brings the traditional hot selling season, and if you’re among those getting ready to list your own home for sale to take advantage of it, you’ll want to add extra attention to the traditional cleanup. Home for sale or not, you can channel some of your annual sprucing-up energy … Continue reading →

Despite the winter’s chilling effect on all sorts of sales, February saw single family homes, condominiums and townhomes selling nationwide at a full 7% increase over a year earlier. The opposite is true of foreclosures—no surprise, since the health of the market means fewer serious borrower delinquencies, hence fewer foreclosures. Even so, Alaska Real Estate foreclosures are still available, possibly because some of the fiercest competition may be tailing off. Real estate watcher RealtyTrac finds that the institutional investor buying spree appears to be losing steam—which could be very good news for individuals interested in purchasing foreclosures. Typically, Kenai Real Estate foreclosures are listed on an as-is basis — and that means exactly what it … Continue reading →

It’s another aftereffect of the rise in housing prices: piggyback loans in Alaska Real Estate are making a comeback. According to a recent American Bankers Associations Report, the number of piggyback loans originated across the nation more than doubled within the past year. A piggyback loan involves taking out two mortgages simultaneously, with a home equity loan (aka “second mortgage”) ‘piggybacking’ on a first mortgage. In Kenai Real Estate home purchases, piggyback loans typically come into play when the buyer is unable to provide a full 20% deposit. Normally this would necessitate the buyer having to take out private mortgage insurance (PMI), which can be pricey. By going with the piggyback loan alternative, the Loan … Continue reading →

Right at the start of the year, Google announced a surprising move. It said it was purchasing a home appliance maker most of us had never even heard of…for $3.2 billion in cash! It was a gambit that every Soldotna Real Estate homeowner should note, because it signals where some very smart money is headed: right where we live! Remember, Google isn’t just famous for its search engine; it’s also frequently in the news for its forays into any number of futuristic enterprises (those mysterious barges, for instance). The appliance maker that now has Google’s billions in its pocket is called Nest Labs, Inc. Nest makes smart devices that reinvent the traditional ones every Alaska … Continue reading →

In advertising, they call the photo that glamorizes a product its ‘hero shot.’ In the case of a real estate listing in Alaska Real Estate, the pictures that accompany the written description can all be hero shots, if enough care is taken. In one Auburn University study (The Relationship between Property Price, Time-on-Market, and Photo Depictions in a Multiple Listing Service), it was found that adding a single photograph to a listing could lift the final sale price by as much as 3.9%. That’s not surprising, but what is noteworthy is that each additional listing photograph added several hundred dollars to the final selling price. In other words, it’s not just the curbside photo at … Continue reading →

With spring already upon us, we stand at the threshold of Alaska Real Estate’s first major selling season of 2014. If you are preparing to add your own property to the Kenai Real Estate home listings, the International Association of Home Staging Professionals would like to draw your attention to some statistics that bolster their members’ proposition. None is more compelling than this one: non-staged homes remain 79 days longer on market than their professionally-staged neighbors. Still, since not everyone hires a professional staging company to work their magic, you’d think there would be a few DIY alternatives that would well worth doing. Of course, there are: and some go beyond the most well-known staging … Continue reading →

Charlie Chaplin always managed to mix a good measure of insight in with the silent movie knee-slappers. It was “The Little Clown” who once said, “The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.” One way or another, we Americans have come up with a singularly surefire way to overcome that problem: we just constantly redefine what comprises “luxury”! Real estate website Trulia proves the point. Each year they count how frequently certain phrases appear in luxury listings—here in Alaska Real Estate as well as across the nation. From year to year, their findings provide an interesting measure of what’s hot and what’s not in luxury listings. Buyers Want A Room With … Continue reading →

It just might be that a groundswell is spreading throughout the home-buying public. In Kenai Real Estate, smaller houses that used to be difficult to sell are rising in popularity, and I can guess why. First, a little history. Back in 1950, what we would consider smaller houses were the rule: the average square footage came in at just 983 (try to imagine the ‘average’ family with 2 kids, 2 adults and Lassie all shoehorned in there!). By 2006, that figure had blown up to 2,248 square feet—and we all know about the bigger McMansions—just in time for the financial meltdown. Within the next few years, for the first time ever, the upsizing trend had … Continue reading →